To mark what I believe to be the 759th anniversary of Dante’s birth, let’s explore the history of translations of his magnum opus. I previously discussed the history of English translations, so this will focus on other world languages.
The very first complete translation, to no one’s surprise, was in Latin, Catholic Europe’s lingua franca, in 1416, by Giovanni da Serravalle. This was done in prose, and mostly for the benefit of English bishops Nicholas Bubwith and Robert Hallam, attendees of the 1414–18 ecumenical Council of Constance (which ended the Western Schism). Da Serravalle also wrote a commentary on Dante’s life and work.
The first Latin verse translation, by poet Matteo Ronto, was produced from May 1427–May 1431. He used hexameters.
The first vernacular language the poem was translated into was Castilian (i.e., Old Spanish), which Enrique de Villena completed in 1428. He used prose. The first vernacular translation in verse came a year later, in 1429, by Catalan poet Andreu Febrer (seen above).
Another early translation was by Balthasar Grangier in French in 1597. Many people criticised him for not properly understanding Dante’s themes and intentions, though this was the only French translation for almost two centuries. The next ones came from Moutonnet de Clairfons in 1776 and Piedmontese-born Antoine Rivaroli in 1783, and were only of Inferno.
A full French translation appeared in 1812, from Alexis-François Artaud de Montor, followed by Pier Angelo Fiorentino’s 1840 translation and the highly-acclaimed, three-volume 1855 translation by Félicité de Lammenais.
Paolo Principato made a Sicilian translation in the 17th century.
The first German translation, in prose, was done by Lebrecht Bachenschwanz from 1767–69. Karl Ludwig Kannegiesser translated it into verse from 1809–21. Other early German translations were by Adolf Friedrich Karl Streckfuss (1824–26) and Swiss–Italian pastor Giovanni Andrea Scartazzini (1874–90). About ninety German translations appeared in the century after Kannegiesser’s.
Dmitriy Dmitriyevich Minayev published parts of Inferno in Russian in 1843, and translated the entire canticle in 1855. His Purgatorio and Paradiso were posthumously published in 1907. Simultaneous to these translations, Yelizaveta Vasiliyevna Kologrivova published her own from 1842–43. Dante was considered distasteful in Russia on account of the theological clash between Catholicism and Orthodoxy, similar to how he was viewed in the largely Protestant Anglophone world for centuries.
Though Latin had since been displaced by French as Europe’s lingua franca, a new Latin translation in hexameters, by Abbot Gaetano Dalla Piazza, was posthumously published in 1848, four years after his death.
Christian Knud Frederik published the first Danish translation in 1855, in terza rima. Among its admirers was Hans Christian Andersen. In 1860, Julian Korsak’s first Polish translation was posthumously published, five years after his death. The first Hebrew translation of Inferno, by Saul Formiggini, came in 1869.
Parts of the Commedia appeared in Hungarian in 1806 and 1850, though the first complete translation didn’t appear till 1885–99, by Károly Szász.
Bartolomé Miter, the president of Argentina, worked on a Spanish translation between 1862–68, which was posthumously published in 1922. In 1888, two Portuguese translations came from Francisco Bonifácio de Abreu and José Pedro Xavier Pinheiro in Brazil.
Arsen Ghazikian, a Mekhitarist monk, published the first Armenian translations of the three canticles in, respectively, 1902, 1905, and 1924. He lived on the island of San Lazzaro degli Armeni near Venice, and produced many translations of classical Latin, Greek, Italian, and English literature.
Stand-alone Inferno translations have been most popular in Armenian, and some translators were murdered during the Armenian Genocide. The Armenian people feel a powerful symbolism and connection between Inferno and their great national tragedy.
The first Japanese translation came in 1914, from Heizaburo Yamakawa, who worked from Longfellow’s poetic but rather dated English translation of 1867. In 1919, Masaki Nakayama made a proper Japanese translation from the original Italian, and chose to render it in prose instead of rhyme. Yamakawa’s version became the reference text for Qian Daosun, who published the first Chinese translation in 1921 (though only the first three cantos of Inferno).
The first complete Mandarin Chinese translation came in 1939, by Fu Donghua. This version, like Daosun’s earlier work, wasn’t directly translated from Dante’s Italian, but from 19th century French and English translations. The first complete Chinese translation of the original text didn’t appear till 1997, by Tian Dewang. He began this project in 1982.
The first modern Catalan translation, by Narcís Verdaguer i Callís, was published in 1921 to mark the 600th anniversary of Dante’s death. The first Dutch translation, by Albert Verwey, was published in 1923, and the first Romanian translation, by George Coşbuc, appeared in 1925. A Yiddish translation of Inferno, by Lithuanian Shmuel Kokhav-Stern, was published in 1932, the same year Nikos Kazantzakis published a complete translation in modern Greek.
The first Arabic translation, by Hasan Othman, appeared in 1955. He skirted the huge problem of Canto XXVIII of Inferno depicting Mohammed and his nephew Ali in Hell by taking out the offending lines. As most people know, so-called blasphemy in the Islamic world brings the death penalty.
The first Persian translation, by Shojaeddin Shafa, was published in 1957, but didn’t earn a lot of acclaim. At that point in history, Iran was still a modern, liberal, Western democracy, so there was no worry about Islamic nutjobs arresting people for translating or reading haram books.
A Ukrainian translation of Inferno, by Petro Karmanskyy, was published in 1956. A complete translation, by Yevhen Drobyazko, didn’t arrive till 1976. The first Korean translation, by I Sang-Ro, appeared in 1959. Four other Korean versions have since been published.
First-time translations in the later 20th century include:
Esperanto, 1963 (Giovanni Peterlongo)
Irish, 1963 (Pádraig de Brún)
Norwegian, 1965 (Henryk Rytter and Sigmund Skard)
Occitan, 1967 (Jean Roche)
Macedonian, 1967 (Georgi Stalev)
Icelandic, 1968 (Erlingur Halldórsson)
Kazakh, 1971 (Mukagali Makatajev)
Maltese, 1991 (Alfred Palma)
Turkish, 1998 (Rekin Teksoy)
In 2001, Kilimanoor Ramakantan translated the poem into Malayalam, the first time it had ever appeared in an Indian language. In 2006, Nguyen Van Hoan published the first Vietnamese translation, and Shyamalkumar Gangopadhyay created the first Bengali translation in 2011.
The poem was also translated into many Italian dialects during the 19th century, such as Calabrian, Milanese, Veronese, Neapolitan, and Venetian. Under Mussolini’s rule, new translations in Genoese, Roman, Bolognese, and Venetian were published. During the second half of the 20th century, other dialect translations included Istrian, Paduan, Abruzzese, Barese, Turinese, and Comasco. A Triestine translation appeared in 2021. In total, there are about two dozen dialects with translations.
Other languages the Commedia has been translated into to date include Slovenian, Czech, Slovakian, Serbian, Sardinian, Friulian, Galician, Swedish, Bulgarian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Albanian, Finnish, Estonian, Basque, Georgian, Afrikaans, Nepali, Urdu, Tamil, Kannada, Amharic, Mongolian, Provençal, Azeri, Breton, and Belarusian.
Alas, some of these languages, such as Yiddish, Mongolian, and Amharic, have only had a translation of one canticle as of this date, while other languages, like Welsh, haven’t had a new translation in over a century.
Turkish, Japanese, and Persian are three of the Top 5 most prolific recent translations, which seems surprising given how long it took the poem to start reaching non-Western languages. German has the next-most translations of any language after English.
Languages without a translation to date, or only snippets of one, include Hindi, Indonesian, Swahili, Telugu, Western Punjabi, Marathi, and Yue Chinese. There are also no translations into any indigenous African languages.
Dante’s magnum opus transcends place and time. It may take awhile, but eventually it’ll reach these other languages and cultures.
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